Precedence of text presentation over the critical
apparatus
The Preface to this critical Goethe edition in 143 volumes extends to
only seven pages, and the information about the numerous manuscripts and
prints of the poems in the first volume occupies a mere six pages. The
apparatus of variant readings is also maximally concise, being meant as no
more than a "critical appendix".[18]
The presentation of the texts as the author intended them finally to be given
to the public was considered of greater importance than the description of
manuscripts and prints or the details of variants and versions. The editors'
reticence reflects their decision on what matter they considered more or less
worth communicating to the reader. If one recognises two different editorial
aims, each attainable on the basis of authentic and authorial records as
preserved for modern authors: firstly, to reconstruct the shaping and
reshaping process of literary works, and secondly, to define the particular
form of a work with which the
author wished in the final instance to be publicly identified, it is clear that
the editors of the Weimar edition unambiguously gave precedence to the
second. The processes of composing and revising a work were merely of
historical antiquarian interest to them.[19] Generally cognisant of Goethe's
attitude
to his literary output as embodied in the last edition of his works which he
himself supervised (the
so-called "Ausgabe letzter Hand"
[20]),
they considered it their moral duty to respect his final intentions almost
unconditionally.
The serious lack of information within the apparatus, crucially
insufficient details about the manuscripts and the selective and isolative
rendering of the variant readings[21]
have been explained as due to the fact that the "editors of the Lachmann
school"[22] were still bound to the
model of editorial technique in classical philology. There may be some truth
in this, even though, if so, the method has not become outwardly
effective—the apparatus, for instance, is not arranged in the form of
footnotes. However, the explanation casts underserved aspersions on the
pioneers of editing in modern German philology, making them appear as
indiscriminate imitators. What brings them close to their colleagues in
classical philology is a formal matter: the merely selective consideration of
witnesses not chosen as editorial base texts. Yet the reasons for such
selectivity differ. In the case of classical philology, the selection
serves to justify the critically constituted text and is hence determined by
its purpose. In modern editing, by contrast, the author's authentic or
authorised text did not require any justification, and the selection of the
variants was thus not linked to any objective aim, but was subjectively
motivated. This explains the methodological aimlessness of the apparatus
in the Weimar Goethe edition. It is determined by "the most respectful
consideration for the wider circle of educated readers."[23] "Negligences or mere spelling
errors" in
the manuscripts are excluded as an unnecessary encumbrance; it is only
variation which "is heard in the spoken language and which affects the
syllable count and hence, in verse, the metre" that is considered worthy of
record.[24] This guiding rule, it is true,
is not observed consistently.[25] The
apparatus of the Weimar edition has been called a "dead
apparatus"[26] by one of its fiercest
critics. With regard to individual volumes this is certainly an unfair
criticism, but as an overall appraisal it does characterise the curiously
functionless nature of the apparatus. The editors can hardly have remained
unaware of the obvious difference between transmissional variants (the
concern of classical philologists) and the genetic variants integral to the
author's own manuscripts.[27] Yet they
clearly were at a loss how to deal with these,[28] because they saw themselves
primarily
neither as textual critics nor as documentary historians, but as
readers. This understanding of their role corresponds to their
model of the author.
